[Day 2] Hakone, a place nearby Tokyo which its great natural hot spring and ryoukan

We're overslept and woke up around 08.00 AM. We went straight to onsen, since all of us get addicted with it. We clean ourselves before entered the bath. Just like last night, the onsen is empty, without other people around except our group. The ambiance is nice, it's increasing our mood and removed fatigue. After we have enjoyed ourselves enough in onsen, we're planning to have breakfast (When you book a room in Japanese style hotel, or Ryoukan, you will mostly get a dinner or breakfast). But it's only ready at 10.00 AM. Since we have some spare time, we got back to our room and tidy up our luggage. One of my friends even got back to sleep for couple of minutes.

We got our breakfast, consist of one grilled fish, some pickled vegetables, pickled beans, tofu, sweet omelette, vegetable salad dressed with some thousand island sauce, plain yogurt, and potato salad in mayo. I's accompanied with free-refill miso soup and hot/cold ocha (Japanese tea). Some of the dish is pretty bland, and taste kinda light but when you got used to it, its kinda refreshing. I think they purposely made it like that so it's more comfortable and easier to digest in the morning. Simplicity as its best.

We finished our meal, and our plan for today was doing the popular Hakone one day trip. We plan to visit Owakudani, riding cable car, Hakone ropeway, boat across lake ashi and hakone shrine. If we have more time, we are planning to go to the popular yunessun onsen nearby (An indoor and outdoor onsen, available with green tea, sake onsen and red wine onsen). Well, our schedule wasn't going smooth, the Ropeway was closed due to increased of seismic activity that could lead to a minor volcanic eruption in the area. It means we can't go to Tokuwadani as well and taste the famous tokuwadani eggs (black eggs). /sigh.... We change our schedule and plan to go to Lake ashi instead. We rode a bus, operates between Sounzan and Togendai which also covered by Hakone Free pass. When the bus arrived at Togendai pier, we got distracted with souvenir shop along the way and not went straight to the pier. Because of that, we missed the boat and need to wait around 1 hour for the next boat to arrive. Well, this kind of unexpected events that make the trip interesting.

The boat interior is amazing and the view from the boat is beautiful too, you can went up to the deck and saw lake ashi in 360 degrees. We can see the popular Hakone shrine from here. It has been raining since early in the morning, so the climate is very cold that day. We can't really see mount fuji since there's thick fog around.

We arrived at mohakone pier, and it seems that the rain wouldn't stop soon, so we decided to postpone our trip to Hakone shrine and chose a restaurant which provide English menu to have lunch. It cost us about 800 yen per meal. The rain got even heavier, and it's so windy outside. We moved to some coffee shop nearby and order some hot drink to keep our body warm.

The umbrella and rain coat that we bought at seven eleven couldn't covered us from the rain storm. After some waiting, we finally decided to cancel all our trip here and went to french village before going back to our Ryoukan. Back at hotel, we take our baggage and ready to go back to Tokyo. We went to the center hall and shop some local souvenir. It will cost you under 500 yen, 600 yen, 1000 yen, 1400 yen and 2000 yen per item.

We arrived at Ochanomizu station around 9.00 pm, got lost when looking for our apartment *Booked IT HERE. The apartment is amazing, a whole floor for ourselves with kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. It's big enough for even 10 people.